Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan, in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker for the USPS and her mother as a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven. Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, which she dedicated to her father. In this short memoir she explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child".[2] In her 1986 essay For My American Family Jordan explores the many conflicts to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present.[3] In Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan recalls her father telling her "There was a war on against colored people, I had to become a soldier".[2] While grateful to America for allowing him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family, her father was conscious of the struggles his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight.

After attending Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. Throughout her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe"[4] by attending predominantly white schools, but was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book Civil Wars, writing: "No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America."[5]

At Barnard College, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where he pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958 Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965.

Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969) was a collection of poems for children. 27 more books followed in her lifetime, one (Some of Us Did Not Die, Collected and New Essays) was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) and a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan.

In her memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan depicted in detail her relationship with her father in the book and was happy with the outcome stating, "I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there's a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for, let alone encourage, and to understand that this is an okay story. This is a story, I think, with a happy outcome, you know".[7] She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky Jordan stated: "The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now."[8]

Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People",[9] and at Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program Jordan said: "I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success".[10] Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program, which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995, entitled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.[10]

In her 1982 classic personal essay "Report from the Bahamas", Jordan reflects on her travel experiences, various interactions, and encounters while in The Bahamas. Writing in narrative form, she boldly discusses both the possibilities and difficulties of coalition and self-identification on the basis of race, class, and gender identity. Although not widely recognized in its first appearance in 1982, this profound essay has gained much classroom status throughout the United States in Women's and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology. Jordan reveals several issues as well as important terms regarding race, class, and gender identity.

In essentially every one of Jordan's works, including her poems and essays, she repeatedly emphasizes the term or the idea of privilege when discussing issues of race, class, and gender identity. She refuses to privilege oppressors who are similar to or more like certain people than other oppressors might be. There should be no thought of privilege because all oppression and oppressors should be viewed at an equal standpoint.

"Report from the Bahamas" highlights how there is always a conscious feeling and awareness that we as human beings possess due to our race, class, and gender identity. While touring the Bahamas as a Black woman, Jordan found this consciousness was constantly alluded to as it depicted an awareness of the fixed relations or rather fixed separation between Black women. These fixed relations lead to patterns of social stratification, social conflicts, and inequality, which Jordan believes is a huge problem that needs to be resolved in society. Due to this consciousness of race, class, and gender identity, we have the tendency to distance ourselves from forming and having any sort of connection with others and gaining a better understanding of the differences between us.[11] Additionally, due to this consciousness, there are times when these differences are ignored to make things seem better and non-problematic. These racial, class, and gender variances should not act as common enemy that continues to separate us, but rather should bring us together. Likewise, these differences should not be ignored as if they were non-existent, but we must encourage more openness, honest conversations, and make countless attempts to remove these rigid barriers. Jordan states "I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us".[11]

Jordan firmly acknowledges and explains that we as human beings possess two very contrasting identities. The first identity is the common identity, which is the one that has been imposed on us[11] by a long history of societal standards, controlling images, pressure, a variety of stereotypes, and stratification. The second is the individual identity that we ourselves have chosen[11] once we are given the chance and feel are ready to expose our true selves.

Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, aged 65. Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book), which was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.[12]

She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).[13]

In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards.

Author Toni Morrison commented: "In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth... [Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept...I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art."[14] Poet Adrienne Rich noted: "whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart".[14]Alice Walker stated: "Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet."[15]Thulani Davis wrote: "In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.'"[16]